1,721,039 research outputs found
Black market premia, exchange rate unification, and inflation in sub-Saharan Africa
Get PDFIn countries where the black market premium on foreign exchange is exceptionally high, often more than 100 percent, lowering the black market rate to a level close to the market determined official rate will improve the balance of payments and increase exports. Floating the currency to depreciate the real exchange rate and make exports more competitive can raise inflation substantially, however, as governments replace the lost revenue from exports. Inflation will occur even if real government spending remains constant unless there are new taxes or spending cuts to compensate for the loss of implicit tax revenues. To avoid costly surges in inflation, exchange rate reform may have to proceed slowly, otherwise the depreciation is likely to meet with considerable political and social opposition as inflation rises. Once the government closes the spread between the official and black market rates, it faces a decision on whether to continue with a float permanently. Evidence from developing countries over the next few years should give some insights into this issue.Economic Stabilization,Environmental Economics&Policies,Markets and Market Access,Access to Markets,Economic Theory&Research
Give growth and macroeconomic stability in Russia a chance - harden budgets by eliminating nonpayments
Get PDFThe authors analyze the links between Russia's disappointing growth performance in the second half of the 1990s, its costly and unsuccessful stabilization, the macroeconomic meltdown of 1998, and the spectacular rise of non-payments. Non-payments flourished in an environment of fundamental inconsistency between a macroeconomic policy geared at sharp disinflation, and a microeconomic policy of bailing enterprises out through soft budget constraints. Heavy untargeted implicit subsidies flowing through the non-payments system (amounting to 10 percent of GDP annually) have stifled growth, contributed to the August 1998 meltdown, through their impact on public debt, and have made at best a questionable contribution to equity. Dismantling this system must be a top priority, along with promoting enterprise restructuring and growth (by hardening budget constraints) and medium-term macroeconomic stability (by reducing the size of subsidies). Getting the government out of the non-payments system means settling all appropriately controlled budgetary expenditures on time, and in cash, and eschewing spending arrears, thereby setting an example for enterprises, and laying the groundwork for eliminating tax offsets at all levels of government, and insisting on cash tax payments. To stop energy-related subsidies, would require not only that the government pay its own energy bills on time, and in cash, but also that the energy monopolies be empowered to disconnect non-paying clients. This will enable the government to insist that the energy monopolies in turn pay their own taxes in full, and on time.Banks&Banking Reform,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Economic Theory&Research,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Municipal Financial Management,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Economic Theory&Research
Black markets for foreign exchange, real exchange rates, and inflation : overnight versus gradual reform in sub-Saharan Africa
Get PDFThe black market foreign exchange premium is an important implicit tax on exports, creating a conflict between the fiscal goal of financing government spending with a limited menu of tax instruments and the allocative goal of stimulating exports. In this paper, the premium is solved for in a model that includes the portfolio balance approach to exchange rates, dual exchange markets, and seignorage for financing the fiscal deficit. The steady state and dynamic implications for inflation of floats as a vehicle for unifying official and black market rates are then analyzed. Inflation could rise substantially in the new steady state as the lost revenue from exports is replaced with a higher tax on money. Further, the conditions under which undershooting or overshooting occur are parameterized. The paper is motivated by and illustrated with recent examples from sub - Saharan Africa.Markets and Market Access,Economic Theory&Research,Economic Stabilization,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Russia 1998 Revisited: Lessons for Financial Globalization
Get PDFIn 1998, the Russian Federation experienced one of the most severe emerging market crises of the 1997–2001 period. It occurred less than six months after the attainment of single-digit inflation, which was supposed to launch the economy onto a sustainable growth path. This note sets out why that occurred and discusses the lessons learned.Russia, globalization, crisis, inflation, currency, ruble, 1998, savings, financial market, soviet
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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